By its very nature, space exploration involves delays in communication between bases on Earth and missions in remote locations such as the Moon and planets. In the case of the Moon, there is a 1.3 second communication delay in each direction from and to the Earth, or 2.6 seconds round trip. In the case of proxy robotics (above), wherein a human handler guides a proxy robot by “seeing” through that robot's “eyes,” the 2.6 second round trip delay between a “follow me” movement and its visual confirmation can result in dizziness, nausea and disorientation in the human handler.
Planetary exploration generates a far longer delay: between 3 and 22 minutes each way between Earth and Mars, for example, generally resulting in agonizingly slow progress for robotic vehicle missions as Mission Control issues a command and then waits 10 or 20 minutes for video confirmation that it has been successfully carried out.
The invention of the present patent application overcomes such video delay problems by computer-generating a video stream approximating as nearly as possible what the remote robot will see at the exact time when a handler's “follow me” movement or robotic controller's joystick command reaches it. In the case of a proxy robot on the Moon under the control of a human handler on Earth, the approximated video displayed to the handler will be 1.3 seconds in the proxy robot's future, the time the proxy will receive the handler's instructions.
With a communication delay measured in minutes rather than seconds, a robotic mission to Mars presents a bigger challenge when it comes to approximating times like 5, 10 or 15 minutes in the robot's future. To generate such an accurate video representation requires detailed video and positional mapping of the entire mission site, and constant updating and refining of the approximated video stream.
The references and descriptions of human proxy robotics are further described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/479,128, “Space Exploration with Human Proxy Robots”, filed May 23, 2012 and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/593,518, “Proxy Robots and Remote Environment Simulator for their Human Handlers”, filed Aug. 24, 2012 which are herein incorporated by reference in their entirety.